Moth-flame optimization algorithm based on diversity and mutation strategy

In this work, an improved moth-flame optimization algorithm is proposed to alleviate the problems of premature convergence and convergence to local minima. From the perspective of diversity, an inertia weight of diversity feedback control is introduced in the moth-flame optimization to balance the algorithm’s exploitation and global search abilities. Furthermore, a small probability mutation after the position update stage is added to improve the optimization performance. The performance of the proposed algorithm is extensively evaluated on a suite of CEC’2014 series benchmark functions and four constrained engineering optimization problems. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the ones of other improved algorithms presented in literatures. It is observed that the proposed method has a superior performance to improve the convergence ability of the algorithm. In addition, the proposed algorithm assists in escaping the local minima.